Here’s a point-and-click camera with a difference. Samsung’s ST500 digital camera has not one but two LCD screens, one at the rear, as you’d expect, and another one at the front.

The ST500, known in some markets as the Samsung TL220, packs quite a punch into its thin frame. The 12,2-megapixel camera has a high-resolution, 3,5-inch touch-screen on the back and a small, 1,5-inch LCD on the front — perfect for lining up those self-portraits or group shots.

You don’t even need to press a button to take a portrait picture. Simply smile broadly, and the camera will take the shot. Now that’s clever.

The ST500, which has a wide-angle, 27mm Schneider-Kreuznach lens with 4,6x optical zoom, is perfect for amateur photographers, auto-correcting many of the mistakes beginners often make. And it automatically adjusts elements such as colour and brightness for a more accurate picture.

The camera also has face recognition technology and prioritises faces it sees regularly when focusing. It can store up to 20 faces in its built-in memory.

The ST500 has other useful features, including a blink detection mode that will take a series of pictures if someone blinks when the first picture is being taken.

For the vain out there, there’s even a “beauty shot” mode that makes skin look smoother and brighter. And you can automatically focus on an area of the picture simply by pressing that area on the touch screen. Hold you finger on the screen for a couple of seconds to take the picture.

But perhaps the most impressive feature of the ST500, given its size, is the fact that it can record high-definition video (720p) at 30 frames a second in H.264 format.

The ST500 supports external SD cards up to 4GB and SDHC cards up to 8GB in size.

The only thing we felt was missing from the camera was a GPS receiver for geo-tagging.
But the ST500, which costs R2 999, is good value at the price. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral

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